Image compression reduces the sizes of image files for ease of storage and transfer. Some image compression schemes may rely on statistical correlation among pixels of an image to achieve compression. Techniques such as increasing the number of prediction directions, as well as the use of partitions and transforms have increased compression coding efficiency of these image compression schemes. The use of such techniques often significantly increases the complexity of both image encoders and image decoders for relative small gains in coding efficiency.
Other image compression schemes may take into account visual redundancy in addition to statistical redundancy. These schemes may compress an image by identifying and utilizing features within the image to achieve higher coding efficiency. For example, edge-based and segmentation-based coding schemes take into account the human eye's ability to identify edges and group similar regions of an image. However, the lack of development in edge and segmentation detection tools may limit the efficacy and efficiency of these image compression schemes.